Re:The mathematics of science’s broken reward system
by yk on Thursday November 17, 2016 @03:47PM
(#12981375)
That is what I meant with 'grounding.' I say that mathematics can be a useful tool, however contrast this with the situation in physics, we have comprehensive theories and we have the situation were we can be very certain that all future theories contain something that can be identified with atoms and even more, if one uses a mathematical theorem then we can be confident that there is something in nature that corresponds to the results. We don't have anything similar in all other intellectual endeavors, but people treat physical and non-physical models similar.
Re:The mathematics of science’s broken reward system
by posterboy on Thursday November 17, 2016 @03:52PM
(#12981434)
>contrast this with the situation in physics, we have comprehensive theories
no, not of gravity or dark matter.
Re:The mathematics of science’s broken reward system
by yk on Thursday November 17, 2016 @04:14PM
(#12981648)
We have a very good theory of gravity, general relativity, and actually for anything that was ever used to build anything including the Voyager probes, Newtonian gravity is enough. In a sense we even have a safety net.
As for dark matter, the reason we don't have a good idea what dark matter is, is that is has almost no effect on normal matter. So the reason why we can ignore dark matter everywhere except at the frontiers of physics is, that dark matter only matters when one spends awesome resources to try to detect it.
Someone goes and builds a bridge. The bridge collapses because they applied mathematics in a way to maximise profit, with a safety margin just beyond what they can get away with by existing regulations. 5 million other bridge engineers also do the same, so that eventually bridge engineers get a bad rep, and people think bridges are awful awful things. This doesn't mean mathematics or quantitative analysis is at fault - and in fact these tools can be used to examine the incentives and other social dynamics that led to these situations, to be able to fix them more effectively in the future.